Big Brother is Watching You

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it."
-1984

You know that you're in the 21st Century when an internet corporation declares war on a country.

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/can-google-beat-china/

When Google made the announcement that it would shut down it's Chinese search engine due to government censorship, the world was shocked by the news. While China's disregard for human rights had been made very apparent over the last few years, this was by far the largest reaction towards that rational yet: Google was actually shutting down it's search engine there as a protest against China's oppressive society.

The reason the Chinese government censors it's web is the same reason for it's state run media: the government of China since the communist takeover spearheaded by Mao Zedong has been very oppressive for the sake of destroying all possible resistance or threats to power. In a way, China's government somewhat resembles INGSOC from 1984, in that they seek to control their populace mostly for the sake of keeping the communists in power. There have been many small rebellions by the people, but they have not ended well. We all remember what happened in Tienanmen Square in the 1908's.

China is especially censoring of media that comes from out of state. Only 2 or 3 foreign films are allowed to be shown per year in the country. With the internet connection people around the world China has upped the ante, with the government creating filters that censor websites. Some of the most prominent examples were the censoring of Google, and the outright blocking of YouTube.

Despite the outrageous polices of China in terms of the internet, some have actually praised those methods as an alternative for fighting piracy. As discussed before, the advent of the internet allows the Long Tail to be exploited, and there are many materials to be offered, sometimes through piracy. Some have said that imposing a firewall similar to China would possibly help curtail piracy.

In reality it would be counter-effective. China's firewall is very easy to pass via a proxy server or other workaround, and while a US firewall may be more technologically competent there would inevitably be workarounds and backdoors. Also the firewall has been received negatively by the Chinese, and as Americans can be more vocal in protests, an American firewall would just cause more problems in meatspace and cyberspace than solve.

But Google is not the only example of technology being used to protest government. In 2009, there was a massive outcry in Iran against the election results, and students took to the streets expressing their anger. While Iran's government is oppressive for religious reasons as opposed to political, it remains similar to China. Protesters conducted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against government websites, and exchanged methods for this via social networking sites like Facebook. In response, Iran shut off internet access completely.

The protesters didn't stop there though. They used the Twitter messaging service to co-ordinate protests and DDoS attacks, as well as receruit hackers. The Iranian government's response was twofold: first they looked for Twitter accounts to see who had their location set to the capital city, Tehran, so they could track the user of that phone and arrest them. Word of the protests had spread though, and before long many people around the world set their location to Tehran to fool the Iranian government. Iran eventually blocked the usage of cell phones all together.

1984 never discussed how something akin to the internet could be used to bring down a government, although novels of the "cyberpunk" genre often employ that as a plot device. The world we live in though is rapidly turning into a technologically oriented society, and the internet is now a much more powerful weapon in terms of dictating the rule of government. The internet can express the opinions of all in a free, democratic society like ours, and at the same time it can threaten to topple oppressive ones like China and Iran. This is the reason for the censorship in those nations, and now with Google declaring open dissatisfaction with China, this could be a signal that yet another uprising is about to begin.

下來與哥哥!

مرگ بر برادر بزرگ!

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER!

Interesting links:
http://www.webcitation.org/5ic0PcGvi article on the use of Twitter in the Iranian protests.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/world/middleeast/14iran.html?_r=1 NYT article on the protests.